Monday, December 29, 2014

Every since President Obama announced that the U.S. would relax its travel and economic restrictions on and open up normal diplomatic relations with Cuba, the predictable people have been making the predictable denunciations, while the American people have seemed pretty clearly able to recognize--at least this once!--a pointless policy leftover from the Cold War for various partisan reasons when they see one. But the most interesting reactions I've heard have been those which have come from students and faculty I know here at Friends University, several of whom have been able, through our jazz and pre-med programs, to visit Cuba in recent years. Nearly all the comments that I've heard and read from them--everyone of which was otherwise supportive of the change in policy--included some statement along the lines of: "I'm grateful I was able to visit Cuba before it becomes commercialized." That is, opening up American markets to Cuba is going to bring to Cuban society American economic opportunities, and their many consequences--and these folks were happy to have been able to see the place before that happens.

I really don't think you can reduce that sentiment to some stereotypical liberal condescension towards the Cuban people and the "authentic" experience which visiting them and seeing their lives may offer to middle- and upper-class bourgeois Americans like myself. For one thing, the bare fact that Cuba really has, thanks to the double-whammy of the decades-long American embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, been forced to build, over a period of 25 years, a genuinely home-grown and isolated alternative to global capitalism--and has had remarkable success in doing so--has been noted by many. Without pharmaceuticals from the United States, Cuba nonetheless achieved higher levels of life expectancy and lower levels of infant mortality than any other comparable country. Without wheat and beef from the Soviet Union, Cuba--well, let Bill McKibben explain, as he did at length in this article, and then again in his book Deep Economy:

What happened was simple, if unexpected. Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens--and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, the combination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They're still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal--they've gotten that lost meal back.

In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth....Cuba has thousands of organoponicos--urban gardens--more than two hundred in the Havana area alone. The Vivera Organoponico Alamar is especially beautiful: a few acres of vegetables attached to a shady yard packed with potato plants for sale, birds in wicker cages, a cafeteria, and a small market where a steady stream of local people buys tomatoes, lettuce, oregano, and potatoes for their supper. (Twenty-five crops were listed on the blackboard the day I visited)....What is happening at the Vivero Organoponico Alamar certainly isn't unfettered capitalism, but it's not exactly collective farming either. Mostly, it's productive: sixty-four people earn a reasonable living from this small site, and the surrounding neighbors get an awful lot of their food from its carefully tended rows. You see the same kind of production all over the city; every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems to be a small farm. The city grew three hundred thousands tons of food last year--nearly its entire vegetable supply, and more than a token amount of rice and meat, said Egidio Paez Medina, who oversees the organoponicos from a small office on a highway at the edge of town. "Tens of thousands of people are employed," he noted. "And they get good money, as much as a thousand pesos a month. When I'm done with this job I'm going to start farming myself--my pay will double" (pp. 73-75).

When I last taught my Simplicity and Sustainability class 18 months ago, we read what McKibben had to say about Cuba, and did some research on the organoponicos (like the one pictured above; see more information about them here and here). Urban farming has, of course, become a mainstay of conversations in the United States about building a more environmentally sustainable and decentralized (and therefore, hopefully, more egalitarian) economy, but what the Cuban experience teaches isn't simply about the possibility of an industrialized, urbanized, specialized modern society recovering genuinely popular--indeed, despite the fact that we're talking about a state with a tyrannical government, one might even be tempted to say "democratic"--control over its food supply. It is larger than that: it is the possibility that obtaining the basic resources sufficient for the maintenance of one's health and happiness (at least if one is thinking about doing so in an egalitarian context) might not depend upon, or perhaps even involve, economic growth. Rather, social equality and environmental sustainability might revolve around--at least in certain senses--developing a contentment with, well, poverty.

Not absolute poverty, obviously, or even--comparatively speaking--much serious deprivation. But nonetheless, yes: non-commercialized Cuba, through it's own resourcefulness, was able to produce many fine cultural and social goods, but none of those goods arose from economic luxury, or even plenty. This isn't surprising: in the overwhelming majority of capitalists societies today, the ability of a person to hold onto those goods necessary for a flourishing life involves at least some degree of economic increase: one must expand and transform and stretch one's productivity and desires and services in order to hold onto one's position in the economic flow of the marketplace. This principle thereby licenses all the multifaceted means by which we invest, advertise, leverage, diversify, monetize, and otherwise multiply that which we produce and that which we buy. It's an old (and, I think, socially blinkered, however historically accurate) classical liberal capitalist principle, expressed in a dozen different ways--creative destruction, rising tides, etc.--but always making the same claim: an economy which isn't expanding is an economy that is losing ground.

Well, Cuba--which was truly and profoundly isolated for more than a generation, and which faced hard limits in its ability of those who built it to engage in any kind of growth strategy--definitely lost ground. Yet within their partially-imposed-upon-them-by-necessity stagnation, they developed sustainable, "steady-state" alternatives. Part of this, surely, was an outgrowth of the socialist principles taught as Cuba's official state ideology, but the evidence of countries like Vietnam and China over the past 30 years is that state socialism is entirely capable of adapting itself to global trade and finance capitalism when it can be used to benefit party elites and pacify those who might threaten them. So there is strong reason to suspect that the degree to which Cuba reworked its collective strategies, its public ownership of property, and its economic planning so as to achieve the egalitarian distribution of, and at the same time relatively high levels of, education, health, and nutrition was, on the whole, made possible exactly because there genuinely weren't any economic rewards available to ambitious individual Cubans. The limits which enabled Cuba to become a leader is sustainable agriculture, environmental stewardship, and health care equality arose from a situation that almost no individual, given the choice, would wish upon themselves and their families, if it could be avoided.

And the truth is that, despite the apparently broad acceptance of socialist principles amongst the Cuban population, most probably could choose to avoid it, if only because the sort of training and socialization which made possible the construction and maintenance of a no-growth, egalitarian, relatively poor economy in this case would have led, in a different situation--and quite likely will lead, once the remaining political obstacles to diplomatic and economic openness are overcome--to individual specialization and thus market rewards. As McKibben observed:

Castro, as even his fiercest opponents would admit, has almost from the day he took power spent lavishly on the country's educational system. Cuba's ratio of teachers to students is akin to Sweden's; people who want to go to college go to college. Which turns out to be important, because farming, especially organic urban farming, is no simple task. You don't just tear down the fence around a vacant lot and hand someone a hoe, quoting him some Maoist couplet about the inevitable victory of the worker. The soil's no good at first; the bugs can't wait to attack. You need information to make a go of it. Cuba's semi-organic agriculture is at least as much an invention of science and technology as the high-input tractor farming it replaced (p. 76).

The people which enabled Cuba to achieve so much in its isolated, non-commercialized way are people who could easily be--and might yet become--highly paid botanists and chemical engineers and agronomists at Monsanto or some over corporation which has built its power over the contemporary global food system on exactly those scientific insights and accomplishments (industrial fertilizers, GMOs, etc.) which enabled the Green Revolution to perform its miraculous, both liberating and devastating work. In a world where people live in cities and live their lives as individuals (which is the common rule of all modernity, whether socialist or capitalist), one cannot escape the appeal of specialization and the rewards which breaking out and pursuing growth along one's own chosen path potentially offers. There are strong environmental and moral arguments for working collectively towards genuine egalitarianism and sustainability--even for working towards holding steadily on to one's goods without relying too much on community-undermining, fossil-fuel-power empowered expansion--but there is little evidence that those arguments are entirely persuasive absent some acceptance of (or some unavoidable necessity to work in the context of) outright economic limits. Or, in other words, at least some degree of poverty.

The more I've thought how whole communities or even just individuals like myself can live in alignment with socialist, localist, environmentally sustainable, generally egalitarian principles, the more often I've run up against the simple truth that wealth is--at the sort of extremes which modern market economies regularly both make possible and, to a degree, rely upon--a problem. Locavores and foodies of many different stripes all basically agree that if you want to really be certain about the quality and fairness of one's food supply, one is almost certainly going to have to eat less--less steak, less sugar, less of all sorts of expensive and/or imported foods which are available to us primarily because of complex, specialized, and usually exploitative systems which those in a position to profit from efficiency have built on our behalf. The same really goes for ever kind of finite material good--energy use, health care, and more. Perhaps (and this is the hardest question of all) the same even goes for socially constructive political goods as well. Cuba was hardly paradise; it was, and is, a terribly poor country, not to mention a tyranny. Living under that regime of imposed and internal limits enabled the construction of something which those with eyes to see recognized as something of a non-commercialized wonder. But would any of us on the left actually want to accept the realities which enabled that accomplishment? I'm doubtful. And that, perhaps, is something very sad indeed.

4 comments:

A very good piece in many ways, particularly in your explanation of the link between necessity and actualization of sustainable agricultural practices. I think unreflectively and assertively calling Cuba a "tyranny" without historical context is, at least, irresponsible. The sweeping claim about what _anyone_ "on the left" would be willing to endure to achieve a transition to sustainability is also a little careless. But that's why it's a blog, I suppose.

Matt, considering that I am willing to label some of Obama's war-power grabs (continuing in the fine tradition of his predecessors) as "tyrannical," strictly speaking, I have no problem describing the Castro brothers' rule in similar terms. And was my conclusion a sweeping claim? More like a broad suspicion, I think. But thanks much for your kind words, regardless; your opinion was one I was particularly hopeful to hear.

I'm just an anonymous lurker and few-times-recently commenter, but I have to say good bye forever after reading this post. The Cuban regime is evil. Period. Full stop. See http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/letter-cuba-embargo-or-not and http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_havana.html for accounts from that noted right wing ideologue Michael Totten. Your attempts to find good things to say about it makes clear there can be no common ground to be found in your worldview and mine.

Always sorry to lose a reader, but I can respect your decision. Though, if you do ever happen to come by again, perhaps you could point out to me where, exactly, I "attempt[ed] to find good things to say about [the Cuban regime]" in this post? Because I don't think I said any such thing. I did quote Bill McKibben talking about the emphasis the Castro regime (which I explicitly called "tyrannical" in the post) placed on education as a positive thing, and I did mention how the Cuban government had to re-arrange many of its local economic distribution patterns following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, but honestly, it seems to me that all that just points to what, as I say, "the Cuban experience teaches" us, not a defense--much less praise!--of the government which oversaw those experiences.

More generally, I suppose I'm just the sort of person who believes that any and every human endeavor that lasts any length of time is going to inevitably generate habits and decisions out of which good as well as evil may be seen. That doesn't sit well with many people, I know; one of my heroes, the Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, eventually came to recognize that there were vital lessons about the limits of capitalism which can be learned from appreciating the world sought by Southern conservatives and agrarians, and a lot of his friends on the left never forgave him for that.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."